“Black Smoke”

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Via Pitchfork

Tindersticks set themselves an impossibly high bar with their brilliant first three albums in the 1990s, but they've still found a way to survive, even after their first-ever lineup change a few years ago. The distinctive, syrup-thick voice of Stuart Staples keeps Tindersticks Mk II on a firm sonic tether to the original band, but here he's even flirting with ways to subvert that, coating himself in a bit of haze. The band heads down to the Velvet Underground, grinding out an insistent, bone-simple rock vamp to carry Staples along. But then there's that saxophone. It's so contextually weird, slithering and squealing through the whole song, matching Staples line for quivering line. It reminds me a bit of the way Andy Mackay sometimes used to wield his sax and oboe in Roxy Music, but that band never got this down-and-out. Staples never could win, and here he's got black smoke in his lungs, eyes, and his feelings. The backing vocals spryly repeating the title even seem to mock him in his misery. It's the same emotional jumble that always made Tindersticks compelling, presented a little differently.

[from Falling Down a Mountain; out 02/16/10 in the North America on Constellation and 01/25/10 on in Europe on 4AD]